Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman

Peterborough, ON: Dover Publications, 2005. Soft cover. As New. As New; In her classic manifesto, A Vindication of the Right of Women, pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) embraced an egalitarian social philosophy as the basis for the creation and preservation of equal rights and opportunities for women. In the posthumously published, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft drew upon similar reasoning, presented in a fictional framework to illustrate the grim reality of a woman's life in the 18th century. The tale of a woman locked up in an asylum by her abusive husband, Maria dramatizes the effects of the era's draconian English marriage laws. Combining the spirited rhetoric of a philosophical tretise with a narrative as gripping as any gothic fiction, this is the book that laid the groundwork for modern feminism.